


A world without me in it

by Haus



Category: Halloween Movies - All Media Types
Genre: Asphyxiation, Dark, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, Kidnapping, M/M, Physical Abuse, Stalking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-07-23 16:39:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16162778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haus/pseuds/Haus
Summary: Your friends don't know that they're never going to see you again. No milk cartons.





	1. The Falling Cherry Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! I finally caved into writing a Halloween fic, and my first ever multi-chapter fic to boot. I wanted to write something long, something raw and dark. This is not a feel good ride, so I hope you enjoy that. Tags will be updated as the story progresses!

One shoe on and one lost far and away, you’re standing to the side of a wide trail that extends forward farther than your tired eyes can limit. You’re looking at your feet, straddling both the edge of the forest and the inky gravel of the path, as you shiver from the cold mud splashed across both of your shaky, huddled legs. 

It’s late October, and you’re totally alone. 

Your bleary eyeline wanders from the rich brown of the earth to the startling yellow that surrounds you. Your heart sways like the trees– taking in how they completely dwarf you and how their leaves reflect the brilliant, transient light of the Autumn twilight hour. Through being nearly completely disoriented, your focus is flickering yet honed.

You stumble forward and keep up the momentum. A single image is what manages to propel you forward despite the faintness you feel, and yet you know the more you dwell on it, the more you risk becoming totally paralyzed.

 

-

 

Not too long ago you were riding the bus that drove a circuit from your part time job in Haddonfield’s quaint town green to a street that was a five minute’s walk to your home in one of the more secluded and shaded neighborhoods. Your time’s been halved between your hometown job and your final year at a college a few towns over. 

Like every other day of the past number of semesters before it, you got off at your neighborhood street and turned right to head back home– while the afternoon was still bright and your energy hadn’t yet waned. You thought about starting to chip away at your midterm papers and setting the ingredients for a vegetable stew you prepared the morning before your shift (at one of Haddonfield’s small cafes) on the stove. 

Yes, an idyllic, little cafe. Though in this small town, rather than with other college kids, it was mainly frequented by middle-aged professionals on their lunch break and the retired. You didn’t mind it that much, but anytime you caught a rare glimpse of someone your own age setting off the chimes by the front door, for the moment that your eyes met had the undeniable, ghost feeling of a salute to it.

Life was like a smooth and monotonous dream, churning towards a vague endpoint that you hadn’t planned quite yet– instead focusing on all the smaller daily tasks of the here and now. You kind of bordered on being afraid of the arrival of your illy-planned future, if you didn’t feel that everything would somehow always be the same or somehow eventually turn out for the better.

Somehow.

But for now, and since your earliest memories of being raised here, your life seemed like the reason why hazy 90s cult films don’t have epilogues or surpass the two hour mark– other than the physical parameters of the VHS tape. Despite the glow and warmth of it all, even the most picturesque of existences slip into an unfilmable pattern. It really felt like yours was no exception.

This street is familiar, and the bus slows to a stop creaky with brakes and wheels. As the last sounds of your bus are extinguished by birdcalls and breeze, you feel an inexplicable urge to turn left. You’re especially lured by the scenery today and have become dismally aware that these lolling stretches of daylight are the last of the season. The last time you remember exploring these woods you were just a kid, living here with both your parents, and you feel the urge to reconnect with that sense of adventure you used to instinctually follow so much. As much as taking a walk could be an adventure? 

So you turn left towards the threshold of the woods, taking one last look back at the direction of your home, a few streets away from where you stand and obscured by trees; thinking about your red front door and the key for it in your pocket and time. This afternoon, the full cacophony of nature is so lush and surrounds you like all the pricks of sunlight streaming through the gaps of the yellow leaves overhead. 

You break yourself out of your trance and check the life of your cellphone battery, feel comforted by it, and continue onwards. Everything around you is so golden and bright as you pass through the trails adjacent to the residential area of your neighborhood. Though following the tail of your spontaneity has shaken your routine, your environment is as dreamlike as ever. You almost don’t see it.

You’re almost so distracted by the bright flora and all the sunlight that your eyes barely catch on a fallen tree trunk on the ground a ways from you. The passing of an unknown span of time has blackened its bark and scattered clusters of mushrooms along its body. Fungi interests you, and there’s not much else to differentiate your landscape, so you gravitate towards it. For all you know, this could very well have been one of the logs that you used to balance across as a child while playing pretend or whatever. 

The pale stalks of the mushrooms that grow there are so pretty in their own alien way, and their perfect, white caps are made warmer by the glow filtering through the branches above. You peek around them for further inspection, hand steadying itself against wood, and you’re met with a sight so startlingly unreal that it almost doesn’t quite register. 

A human body on the ground laid down along the body of the log, almost hidden. You already know something’s absolutely not right just because it’s there, you’re not naïve enough to think this person fell asleep in the middle of the woods; you immediately think that maybe they’re hurt. 

You’re not wrong. It’s enough to see that their eyes are open but not blinking, one of them half closed and swollen, both glazed and seemingly staring at the sky. Blood mars their face and neck in crusted streaks that draw your gaze to two dark bruises on their throat, covering nearly their entire neck. Then you see the arm a few feet away. Then parts of a tongue before you manage to screw your eyes shut.

There is too much to take in before your stomach drops violently at the realization that although the skin is pale and mottled, it’s not rotted. There are insects spiraling around in the dirt near them, but not any noticeable bit of decay.

You move away from the death scene in a quick backwards pivot, breaking a few small twigs underfoot. The sound is jarring because it’s unexpected, not because of its volume. Despite everything you saw, a dozen different birdcalls are still sounding off over each other, and the wind is still whooshing between the tree trunks like some unpredictable stream. Your fear is like poison; sealed and gnawing into and through you. At once, you’re both so horribly shaky inside, yet your limbs feel sticky with dread. 

Was there some kind of animal attack? But nothing’s missing or eaten exactly... And the hand marks...

You don’t really know what to think right now of it.

Your head whips around to look about you as you’re suddenly feeling very exposed– but no immediate, likely cause comes to eye. 

The only thing you’re sure of right now is that you’re not in the mood to explore anymore at all. In fact, leaving right now exactly the way you came seems like the only course of action you can focus on. Yep. Hanging around here, around this, is not a good idea. You’re certain you’ve either seen too many horror movies to be this spooked or you’ve seen precisely enough to know that you need to leave as soon as humanly possible.

You try not to look at the corpse again, orbiting yourself back around the fallen trunk and being mindful to be quick but careful over all the fallen natural debris in your path. Every noise you make in doing so seems like too much noise, and you just hope that your nerves are amplifying the sounds and that all the wood you’re breaking and the leaves you’re crunching with your shoes aren’t enough to compete with the all the birds and crickets and other wildlife.

Picking up the pace, you don’t hear anything (or anyone) following you, but stopping is not something you’re considering at this point. Not until you’ve been running for a few full minutes straight, crashing across freezing puddles of old rainwater and startling off frogs. The air near your feet is cold, even as the Autumn sunlight that settles for moments around your shoulders is warm. When you finally stumble into an exhausted stop, your environment looks decidedly different. 

You’ve ran right onto a larger path; it looks comparatively more kept than what you were on earlier and you think that maybe you’ve happened onto one of the nature reserves near your neighborhood.

Even at your tentatively good level of fitness, you’re winded. The suddenness and duration of your sprint– and your fear – left your skin and sides burning. But, you’re wary of the careless trail you’ve left here. In your self-preserving attempt at distance, you’re afraid that it wouldn’t be too hard for something to figure out where you ran to. So you proceed at a steady and calm pace forward, following your hunch that if you keep going long enough, you’ll find an eventual exit. 

Oh, you’re definitely paranoid.

There are better words for this (but you’re not dwelling on words) – ...you feel unbelievably unlucky.

The one time you decide to go out on your own, and you find yourself in the middle of some kind of murder scene. And even if you’re confident that whatever’s responsible wouldn’t have seen your face or much else of you by the time you were already running– you still feel very much on the periphery of danger and involvement of something you didn’t want to be involved in.

You want to scream for any people around and keep running, but again, you’ve seen the horror movies, so you keep quiet and keep walking. Very quickly.

It’s another ten minutes before you find a small gate through some trees on your left leading out to a side street; it’s unofficial and just a striped, painted bar– but you take it. When you step past it, your surroundings are still vaguely familiar enough to beeline through a number of streets back to your home. 

Your feet make a dragging sound as you stumble through the gravel of your driveway, pebbles shifting with every step before you stop and look up at your red door. 

The color is rather dull, and the edges of the wood seem to flake from years of wet and shade. Your fingers fumble in their pockets before you fish out your keys. You feel vulnerable out in the open, even with the shielding wall of trees all around your home and yard.

Front door, then screen door. You close each and make sure they’re locked behind you. Then you walk around to the opposite side of the house, to your small hallway of a kitchen, and check your backdoor as well. 

The floorboards creak underneath your dirty shoes, but you ignore the mud you’ve tracked in. You stand there for a long time, looking out through the long stretch of old windows over your kitchen counter. 

You gaze blankly out at the trees that seclude your home from the outside world and lead into the array of woods and yards that surround here. The hour and a half you’ve been gone was enough for outside to be considerably dimmer now with the shift into nighttime. You see less and less as you stand peering through the dust-filled screens fitted outside the glass. Frogs start croaking from your small pond outside, and the birdcalls fade down to more direct back and forths. And crickets.

Swallowed up by your dark and aging house, it’s a long time before you feel like you can move again.

There aren’t many rooms in your house, and none of them are particularly spacious either, but it’s more than enough for a single person. During your childhood, when mom and dad lived there, it definitely felt more cramped. You only live in the kitchen, the dining room, and bedroom. Your parents left you this house as it was too rundown to sell and too expensive to completely fix up. 

You find it lovely, though. All you hear is nature when you open your bedroom window on the minuscule second floor; you feel hidden here. Which is better than all the times you’ve instead felt almost masochistically aware of your own loneliness. 

You continue on your circuit through the rooms to nurse your anxiety. Making sure your home seems as secure as a home like this could possibly be. It’s so hard to step down the stairs again; you keep imagining how someone could just crash through one of the windows in here and grab you. How you’re completely alone. How when you turn on the kitchen light you can’t really see anything outside anymore– but you’re pretty sure anyone out there would be able to see you holding yourself now, shifting your weight from one foot to the other. If you’re right, you probably look terribly silly and stupid. The nagging sense that you’re actually wrong makes you _feel_ terribly silly and stupid.

This is still a welcome respite from the recurring intrusive worry about being murdered.

Before anything else, you duck into the nearby laundry closet and unbutton your jeans, pulling off each filthy and crusted leg down past your ankles to throw in the hamper. You bend to slip into some pjs in the hallway. 

You try to slip into the mindset of safety as easily as your new clothes, a familiar routine you’ve created from the last half a year of living alone. You try to equate this night and all the other nights you were anxious from being all by yourself here and ended up being just fine– even through the glaring difference between now and then of the source of your fear.

You pad back into the kitchen and lightly drop a kettle onto the stove. Lifting a pot from where it had been hanging on the wall, you bring it over to the sink to fill it halfway with water and set it on the burner right beside the kettle. You avoid trying to look outside too much and instead just listen to the sounds of you sorting through various glass tupperwares for spices and to the wood of the house creaking in ways that make you hold your breath despite yourself. 

_So silly._

You focus on the rhythm of your chopping, hand like a claw on an onion. You grab the rest of your prepped veggies still in the fridge and toss them all in the pot once it comes to a boil. Set a timer. You stand, looking away from the windows and at your stove.

When the kettle for your tea starts whistling, you turn off the gas immediately, so sensitive to the noise. You grab a pale green mug from one of the overhead cabinets and drop in an herbal teabag; pour. Now you have something to hold other than yourself while everything cooks together. A grounding spearmint. Fantastic.

Why didn’t you call anyone?

Your fingers tap the warm ceramic. Tea is still too hot to sip and needs more steeping. Stress fills in the muscles of your face and crest in your back.

Why didn’t you call the police? Your mother... even a park warden would have been an option. 

Is it because you were so unused to thinking of relying on others that it didn’t even occur to you in the moment?

You really just wanted to get out of there, and you knew you had nothing else to protect you so, you did what you think anyone else would have done– you chose flight without a second thought. 

No excuse to put it off anymore though.

Moving almost defensively to the second floor, you hole yourself into the bathroom next to your bedroom and close the door. No windows in here. Fishing into your pocket for the long neglected cellphone, you lift it up and press three numbers. You wait for an answer, and speak evenly and low into the receiver. 

You tell them about the body in the woods, try to be as specific as you can about where exactly it was. Which wasn’t as exact as they would have liked, being a random spot in the woods.

You thought you were fine, keeping calm, but your heart is beating so fast without you realizing it. The sound of a thud somewhere outside in the yard seizes you up, and you freeze. 

The emergency responder says they’ll send some officers over to check it out in an hour or so. It was probably a wild animal attack, but you should come into the station tomorrow to give a more formal statement for the report anyway. You give them your information before hanging up. 

You lower your phone.

You’re very aware, again, in exactly the way you had been trying to remain unaware, of how alone you are. It’s a paralyzing sentiment that makes reopening the bathroom door a more intimidating task. Like _holy shit_ , you’re even starting to get mad at yourself now. You let the door swing the rest of the way open then, and you don’t jump when it scuffs against the wall.

You beeline down to the kitchen, quietly as you can. You don’t question your cautious behavior tonight, because some instinctive part of you feels it’s needed, and it’s soothing to your nerves in some useless way.

You catch your timer just as it’s about to ring out and turn off the stove. You give the soup a small taste, and it’s warm and delicious, but at this point you’re not in the mood to eat anymore, stomach in knots– so you transfer everything into a container to stick into the fridge and bring to work in the morning and begin to clean up.

The crickets chirp in their sharp patterns, which you prefer this to the house’s creaking. Nighttime’s been growing chillier through the progression of the month, and this part of October is the last of the year’s mild weather and the last of the crickets.

Instead of food, you pour yourself a glass of almond milk and shut off the kitchen lights and all other lights you pass as you make your way up the stairs again– not thinking of the growing darkness you leave in your wake. Where you live, your house is one of the few sources of light around, and when it’s night, outside is near pitch. A heavy darkness that the meager spattering of your neighbors’ homes do little to alleviate. It’s not uncommon for you to fall asleep with your bedroom light on, and since your parents left you this place it’s become more of a bad habit. But you never do it on purpose.

You brush your teeth and wash up. Watch the skin of your cheek stretch as you clean your teeth and gargle and spit. Pat hot water onto your skin and to the back of your neck. You think about the body; you compartmentalize the blood and parts. The hand marks. 

Your neck’s bent down from wiping the sweat from the nape of it, and you glance back up into your reflection. You bring your hand up to your throat, mirroring the bruise from the body. Wince.

Stepping into your bedroom, you lock your door behind you, before moving across the floorboards to turn on the lamp sitting on the nightstand next to your bed. It illuminates the room with a warm, diffused glow. It’s enough of a comfort you for now.

When you tuck yourself into bed and lift the comforter up over you, you turn onto your side and reach for your nightstand drawer. As you pull it out and stick your hand inside to fish around for your green lighter. 

The first few raindrops of the night begin their slow staccato against the leaves. There’s a basket full of incense underneath the table that your arm brushes downwards to pluck a lavender incense stick from, still keeping your balance on the bed– efficient from many nights of your calming routine. You light it, slip it into its ornate little holder, and relax back onto your mattress. 

Springs squeak through the layers of down and linen, your arms and legs feel like they sink downwards into eternity. You let yourself close your eyes and drift off somewhere while you listen to the rain build into a steady rhythm.

You think about the body in the woods decomposing in the rain. You imagine clumps of maggots and the transformation of flesh into earth.


	2. We Touch In My Dreams

Like every morning, it’s the birdcalls that wake you. 

You lay there wrapped in your puffy, cloudlike comforter and white sheets, staring up at a ceiling that’s coated in soft, blue-tinged morning light for the five minutes it takes until the ringing and vibrating of your alarm prevents you from drifting off again. You kick your legs to loosen up the blankets while your hand looks for your phone that’s surely hidden somewhere in all this bedding. Usually it somehow ends up underneath the small of your back while you sleep, and unfortunately today is no different– a faint crick in your lower spine is already blooming. You rifle around until finally the edge of it bumps into your hand. You turn it off, get up, and begin your morning routine. 

Bleary-eyed from the early hour (it’s 6am) and the painfully cold tone of light flooding your bedroom, you advance towards the bathroom more by total muscle memory than sight as you attempt to massage out the burning in your left eye. Your toes are almost freezing, and the floorboards take every opportunity to creak with utter abandon; the endless charms of an old house.

You brush your teeth.

Eyes dart up to check your first reflection of the day before dipping back down just as quickly when you catch the stark purple rings underneath them. It’s not as if it doesn’t make sense. Though, by the time you cup your hands to bring water into your foam-filled mouth, gargle, and spit down into the ceramic, you’re more ready to not care about how shitty you look in the mirror. 

Endure, not care, whatever; you don’t feel like thinking about it for more than a second this early in the morning.

You rake your fingers through your dark hair, tucking some straying strands behind an ear, smooth down a cowlick. Such a deep brown, almost black, that matches your eyes. Which are, at the moment, almost crossing themselves while you stretch and release a short lock of your bangs that is almost long enough now to graze your thick eyebrows.

You wished you remembered to get a haircut or something during the weekend, but with work and... everything else, it slipped your mind completely. You weren’t excited to show up to school like this, not that your friends cared, not that anyone else cared– it was just uncomfortable. 

Your drawers are loud and halting as you pull them open to pick out your half-folded clothes. You honestly can’t remember if any of these are actually clean or not, but you pick out some promising articles and throw them into your waiting backpack on the floor for your upcoming week at school. You backtrack to grab a fistful of toiletries and stuff them in a little Ziploc baggy, which you then throw on top of the carry-on wardrobe you fixed for yourself, before slipping into a white t-shirt you tuck in some cuffed black pants and secure with a slim belt. 

You don’t have much room leftover for outerwear, and don’t feel like carrying it along with you, so you reach into your closet to pull a thick, forest green sweater over your head. Which completely messes the perfunctory job at positioning your hair before with static. It’s not quite something you have much time to bother with now though.

The steps of the staircase creak in quick succession as you rush down them, backpack flung over a single shoulder, and into the kitchen. You bypass your muddy footprints littered all over the floors from the night before– you’re not unbothered by them, but moreso distracted by the warm and acrid scent of your favorite dark roast, which is already wafting through the hallways of your house thanks to your coffee machine’s auto-brew. 

It’s something you only just barely remember setting last night, but you give your foresight a deserved two whole seconds of thoughtful gratitude. 

You pour yourself some coffee in a hefty jade-green mug and take a steadying gulp, then gather up your things into the bag as you wait for the caffeine to kick in. You get your keys and wallet and water, and pour the rest of your coffee into a tumbler to finish during your drive to the station. 

You make a brief and hurried circle around the few rooms of the first floor of your home, relying on any lingering visual cues of familiar belongings to be your last safeguard against forgetting anything; your brain isn’t feeling up to a check list and didn’t the week before either. Or the week before that.

You never have bothered to bring more than one pair of shoes with you during your school week, have no intention to start, so you grab a pair of leather slip ons that are comfy and seem to go with anything you actually wear and slip into them, hooking them over your heels. Straighten back up, pat yourself down.

If you forgot anything, well... you’re only going to be gone a few days anyway. 

Nothing short of what can only be described as a particularly violent jimmying of the lock gets it to turn far enough for you to open the front door and push it closed again. 

You try to laugh at the thought that if you ever had to run for your life from some psycho killer to get inside your house, you would need a hell of a head start to manage to get this warped slab of wood unlocked, opened, closed, and locked behind you in time. This has definitely been an intrusive thought of yours whenever you’ve found yourself fumbling at your front door in the middle of the night, pretty much blinded in the darkness to anything farther than a foot from your face.

Not that you’re too worried about something like that right now– but as you try to twist your house key into the temperamental son of a bitch that is this keyhole, repeatedly turning back and forth trying to find some purchase or movement, your worn out key completely warps and bends inside the metal of the knob. 

It takes you a full minute to wrench out your ruined key from the door, before tossing the now offensively unhelpful piece of metal onto the ground. You bend down to muss a sapling by the steps you’re standing on. It only takes a short search to find the back-up key you keep buried by its roots. Last try.

This one is only marginally better than the original, but you manage to turn it in the keyhole just far enough so that when you turn and shake the handle, the door doesn’t budge again. 

You pocket your last remaining good key and go through the motion of giving a cursory check over your shoulder to see if your neighbor is out in his yard or something, before picking up the twisted up key you had dropped. You stash it away in the dirt among the roots of the sapling where you had kept your back-up, until it’s completely hidden once more.

You don’t feel that particularly great about leaving a key to your house off your person and in what is not exactly the best hiding spot you could have come up with, but you’re not about to start raking the rest of your property for a better one. But it’s little better than unsalvageable scrap metal now, and you don’t want to keep it in your bag in case you cut yourself by mistake the next time you reach in. 

You had been keeping a fully functional key to your house– never mind a broken one that you doubt you could even have repaired yourself– outside your house for the last half year. Which is all the peace of mind you need to leave things as they are.

You amble into your car, shove the doubts that you have about this from your immediate concern, and not quite slam the driver’s side door closed. 

 

-

 

When you pull into one of the vacant parking spots in front of the Haddonfield Police and Fire Department, the street lamps that border the downtown area had only just then dimmed and gone out for the day. 

You get out, cross the cobblestones, and past the automatic doors of the precinct that whoosh open welcome you into a realm of artificial light and filtered air. 

And fake plants.

Checking in with the morning desk officer, a button-nosed and paper-white woman in a fleece-lined bomber, lands you with a clipboard with a thin packet of forms and then a short yellow pencil that had its eraser broken off at some point before getting to you. A utensil that she hands off with a smile that, while amused, you fail to pinpoint any genuine mean-spiritedness in. These items are traded for your ID that she slips into the scanner beside her as you flip through the sheets in your hand.

One of them is a photocopy of an original transcript of your telephone conversation with one of the presiding officers from the night before. Others ask for you to confirm the personal information that you had already supplied them with yesterday. 

The woman behind the front desk clacks away on an outdated Dell, briefly working on something else until you're ready to give your actual in-person statement with her. 

The woods. The body. You lived alone. You were available in town during the weekends.

She slides your ID back onto the counter along with a copy of the report you just gave– but you left your bag back in the car, so when you grab it and somehow manage to crumple half of it in a matter of seconds in front of her, you have no choice but to awkwardly hold it and become totally fascinated with everything but your hands.

The officer doesn't so much as blink an eye at this display and tells you that if they don’t follow-up with a call or visit by next week, you should stop by again. Sounds fine to you. You gotta get going, so you turn and head back the way you came in.

As you’re walking out, you spot a pair of officers entering a patrol vehicle a couple spaces over from your own car. The officer at the driver's side has his window rolled down as he lights up a cigarette, puffing lazy clouds of smoke as his partner adjusts various instruments on the dashboard. You think nothing of it as you start up your car's ignition again, turning up the heat is a welcome relief to the cold outside. Your sweater was just barely doing its job. 

You hear the sharp outgoing tone of the patrol car's police scanner and voices distorted by the glass of your closed side door. Something about an owner reporting a theft from the night before at a local convenience store a block away, finding broken glass from last night when he arrived this morning to open his shop. Registers left intact and not much missing except for a random array of items: bottles of water, a large coil of nylon rope, electrical pliers, two rolls of duct tape, and a seventeen inch Lamson chef’s knife.

You back out and drive on towards the highway, taking sips from your waiting travel mug. 

The sky is a pale and cloudy gray over the road, punctuated by floating power lines and Vs of migrating birds. The drive over to the Amtrak train station in Gilman usually takes around twenty minutes, and thankfully this morning is no exception, as your interrupted commute leaves not much room for traffic or error today.

You stop in the station’s lot, get a parking receipt to stick behind your windshield, and run up the steps to the track. Your heavy backpack bounces on your shoulders, and you flash a conductor outside one of the train cars your ticket while they help someone drag out their small pile of luggage onto the platform. He waves you on ahead.

You’re happy to find an empty window seat and then unceremoniously drop yourself down into it, immediately throwing your bag onto the cushion beside you. The side of your temple thunks wearily against the fogged up glass, mussing up your hair and the flurry of fingerprints smeared all over the pane. The train slowly starts to take off, building momentum with a thundering whistle. Relief settles into you now that you have the permission to mentally check out, take a couple minutes of respite for making it and regret at leaving your half full tumbler in the car. 

Then you resignedly unzip your backpack, pull out the textbook and spiral-bound you brought home this weekend, and crack down on as much homework as you can finish in the little over an hour you have for your commute. As always. 

You don’t seem to find enough energy to find fault at the faith you seem to have every Friday that you’ll accomplish any modicum of time management during your busy weekends. You’re just tired. 

Last night took a lot out of you, and so has this semester and work– as well as other stuff you're trying not to drag up in your thoughts right now. But, the police report, crumpled and lost somewhere in your bag, puts your mind more at ease. 

Now you can devote your full attention to all this–... all this...? 

You check the cover. 

All this Developmental Psychology in your lap.

You widen and blink your eyes hard shut a few times to try and snap out of it. You _did_ wake up earlier than usual today– so you set a timer for ten minutes and let your eyelids droop.

Yeah, you’re not gonna be able to nap when these notes are due today and it’s for your first class. 

Pinching the bridge of your nose, you sigh before starting to write as fast as you can. 

Your eyes burn in your skull.

 

-

 

The shuttle from Illinois Terminal to the front gates of your campus takes no more than five minutes. You meander down the central path to the main quad, passing by a number of historical brick buildings and imposing trees in full autumnal bloom. They seem so full and bright still somehow, even as your feet crunch what you feel might be twice the amount of fallen leaves that were there since last week. 

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

You slow down and stall awkwardly by a podium-like bulletin board. At this point in the semester, it’s pretty much overflowing with an alternating array of neon printer paper, professional looking event posters, and haphazardly written notes on lined paper. 

You don’t see any of your friends waiting around it.

You crane your neck to peer around, readjust your hold on your backpack, before your hand finally dips into the front pocket of your pants to check your text messages.

“Daniel!"

You twist around, finally spotting them casually sitting in the grass at the base of a tall maple behind you. Your smile is wide, even if just a little bit sheepish. You make your way towards them. Abby is waving you over, eyebrows raised questioningly but a small smile ready that mirrors yours. You passed them getting here.

“Hey! Well fu-” And no sooner does that leave your mouth when Andrew interrupts with a loving greeting of his own. 

“Wow, Dan. You look tired as shit.”

And here you were thinking that you didn’t look that bad. You would be more embarrassed if not for the fact that the one person whose opinion on your appearance you actually cared about was noticeably absent.

“Oh, that’s because I’m definitely tired as shit.” 

“Yeah... me too.” Andrew sighs, completely genuine sadness in his voice. 

Abby is silent because she has her thermos almost completely vertical as she tries to chug the last drops from it. She’s the only friend of yours that voluntarily chose to schedule 7am morning classes for herself. Every day. It's obvious she's not doing so well having coming back from one now, but it's not like she's going to drop this late in October.

You only took one of those because you waited until the absolute last moment to register this year, and you’re fairly certain that Andrew would rather drop out than put himself through such useless trauma.

Actually, you thought he only had classes after 2pm this semester so you have no idea why he’s out of the dorms and surprisingly awake right now?

At that moment, you hear a shuffling of footsteps through leaves which draws louder and closer to where you’re all situated, and when you look over, it’s just in time to see the rest of your usual morning misery club: Ben and Hannah, arm in arm, with Lea and Jason bookending them. 

You’ve been friends with Ben since you shared a German class last year, and Abby and Andrew since Freshman year. But, you’re not as familiar with the other, newer additions to the group. 

Though you might not be as close, you all more or less get along. Conversation comes easy enough when Hannah starts talking about the new Luca Guadagnino movie coming out next week. A supposedly very promising remake of a thriller you haven’t seen but everyone else says is good. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t all be game to go see it before midterms wipe you and your friends off the face of the Earth. 

Well, one reason.

“Sorry, can’t make it...” you trail off, rubbing the back of your neck awkwardly at being put in the position of disappointing plans. “The premiere’s on a Saturday, so I’m gonna be home then.”

Andrew’s not having it though, easily shrugging off your attempt to back out.

“We don’t have to go on the premiere, right?” He waits for some sign of approval from Hannah, who seems to be the member most invested in the actual movie itself, before he continues. “I think we can all make it Wednesday night after your last class. Even Paul might make it, I think he doesn’t have practice that week because of the renovating.”

...

That’s precisely what you were hoping _wouldn’t_ happen. If Andrew notices his misstep, he doesn’t let on, but nothing short of a remarkably uncomfortable silence falls over the group. Hannah and Ben in particular seem to be avoid looking at you out of sheer discomfort. You get the needling impression that there's suddenly a lot more eggshells present than before. 

Jason's still calmly reading– but after all, it's Jason.

You’re not going to be the one who breaks it, not anytime soon at least, but thankfully Abby swoops in for damage control before you’re forced to that point. She gives you a _look_ , voice softer than usual with the tinge of concern, “Dan... we don’t have to invite him.”

You’re so tired.

But you don’t want the next seven minutes before you have to head to class to be torture for you or anyone else so–

“Uhh...that’s alright. I’m totally fine if he comes.” 

You’re a filthy liar.

But, you gave your consent, you said it was fine, so everything moves forward with the plans almost insultingly fast, and everyone is happy. Just like you wanted. 

Either your painfully obvious lie was a lot more convincing than you thought it was, or nobody else really cared that much either way. The only other person who seems to catch your distress is Abby, who side-eyes you but deigns to say nothing of it. She can tell you probably would prefer her not to and generously allows you to dissociate.

At this point, with your plans more or less resolved, the group is talking about something else entirely. Even Jason is participating now, letting his thick volume of assorted Socrates slip down momentarily where it has been obscuring his face. Yours is still in Abby’s dorm and you’re going to be needing at some point before you have class with him later.

You don’t really pay attention to what everyone’s talking about now, but a familiar name leaving his lips serves enough to finally drag you back into some semblance of sociability.

“Yeah, it was up in Haddonfield,” Jason answers someone else’s question that you had missed in your stupor.

He’s already watching you when you perk up, a hint of sentience on your face. Like everyone else present, he knows you live there. He probably was expecting your participation from the start.

“That’s so messed up. In pieces?” It was Lea, speaking in her high, usually incredulous voice before wiping her nose against the back of her hand from the cool weather. Your stomach sinks. 

Seeming to be taking a full-on break now, Jason replies with an unenthusiastic “Uh huh.”

“And they have no idea who did it?” Lea pushes, almost testing as if she’s being held out on. You stand quietly, suddenly nervous at the possibility that she might be right. 

_“_ Or maybe...  _what,”_ Ben chimes in theatrically while Nosferatu hand-ing. It’s not funny at all, but taking the piss out of Lea is always fun to be a witness to. 

You’re almost completely sure you already know what they’re talking about, so you’re kind of hoping she’ll pick on Ben in retaliation and move onto talking about something else. 

There is no such luck. “Well, my dad said there were hand-shaped bruises on the guy’s neck so I’m thinking it's who.” 

Jason’s dad was the sheriff of Livingston County, and apparently whatever information the police found on the reserve last night was deemed important enough to be forwarded to the county sheriff's office and then mentioned over breakfast. 

You’re still somewhat reeling at the emotional distress from before, so you don’t feel like bringing up your insight right now unless someone asks you directly. You don’t want to get into it right now. And then you become acutely aware that everyone’s okay and just being normal, but every subject seems to be “getting into it” to only you.

“I don’t know, there’s a lot of shit that goes on there,” Ben persists, slightly more seriously now. “Like Stephen King-type stuff.”

“So... like cryptids?” Abby sounds equally confused and not sure yet if this is something she’s sure she wants to participate in or encourage.

“Guess he better close the case then– I don’t know how my dad’s going to arrest Mothman,” Jason deadpans, silently accepting that this conversation really got away from him and is now something he doesn't care about. His face slowly becomes more and more obscured by his philosophy book while the rest of your friends pick up where Abby left off.

Hannah, to either humor Ben or sate her own boredom adds, “I’m pretty sure Haddonfield was on a map of Bigfoot sightings I saw on Facebook,” before unlocking her phone and starting to scroll.

Yeah, and every other town in the United States.

“No!” Ben exclaims, trying to shut this conversational detour down before conspiracy theories start flying around. “I’m talking about like Pennywise shit. I’m pretty sure there was a clown that killed a kid there a while ago.”

“How long ago?” Jason asks without looking up from his studying. You wish you had the foresight to have been studying from the beginning too, probably have to leave in a minute or so now anyway. 

Ben shrugs.

“Dan,” Andrew starts, trying to get your attention and maybe noticing your lengthy silence, “don’t you live there? Do you ever hear about stuff like this?”

You have, but it’s the same ridiculous urban legend shit you hear about in any other town.

“You know Haddonfield is the suburbs, right? It’s not exactly the middle of nowhere.” You’re referring to the monsters, but you take this as your cue to get going, jerking your head in the direction of Lincoln Hall to signal your intention to the group. “Well, I’m going.”

Everyone either says a verbal goodbye or nods in acknowledgment.

“See you after,” Abby says, “I’ll be in the library when you’re done.” Which is important information since you need her to help you get your next cycle of books from the dorms.

Before you go though, Abby reaches out and smooths a cluster of wrinkles along the front of your sweater. 

You muster a warm and ever applicable thumbs up. You’re pretty sure for the last fifteen minutes you’ve looked miserable, and she’s worried about you. You try to take it as that and not her bringing even more attention to the fact that she thinks you look like a mess and then giving the rest of your friends an opportunity to fill in the blanks as to why. It’s not because of Paul. 

It’s not completely because of Paul!

You’re leaving.

Abby gives one last and very firm slap to your back and it almost propels you away.

But before you make it too far, you turn halfway and shout:

“It’s probably the Chupacabra.” 


	3. Only A Shadow

You’re sitting in Developmental Psych, settling into your weekly, three-hour lecture that you attend in one of the older wings of Lincoln Hall. You’re leaned back, face tilted towards the ceiling, and very much noticing how even at this point of the fall semester, the heating hasn’t been turned on yet.

Part of you is here, listening to every other word of your professor's purposely simplistic explanation of the effect of trauma on the human brain’s maturation. Which is something you vaguely recognize as coming pretty much word for word out of what you had read on the train not too long ago.

The other part of you is thinking about what Jason said– about what it means that he knows. Sitting at the edge of the room, your things spread out over the stretch of your empty aisle, you come up with nothing. You feel that there isn’t much more than nothing to come up with.

The theatre of Lincoln Hall is windowless and far more ornate than a classroom at this college has any right to be: semi-circles of wooden seats tier down towards a scuffed speaker’s podium, every furnishing precariously in the face of an approaching, splintering death. 

The difference between where everyone presides– closer to the dusty, carpeted floor and the decorative, ornate ceiling tiles and historical floral moldings above and all the _marble–_ is really, something.

Your phone keeps buzzing in your bag, in the way it does for messages, not the ringtone. Though checking it now isn’t a good idea. It’ll have to wait. 

It seems as if most of your classmates decided not to show today, something that you sorely wish you could afford to do. You’re not about to ostentatiously do something else, but you’re far back enough to not feel the brunt of your professor’s attention or eye contact, or anyone else’s for that matter. It’s a big room; the instructor’s voice seems to echo into a reverberating wave that’s more diffuse than words. Your back finds something to settle into in the hard planes of your seat. You’re relaxed. Almost content in just belonging to the half of the class that’s not asleep. 

Then chalk on board rouses you. And for the sole fact that you don’t actually know anyone here, and not about to start knowing anyone, you soberly hoist yourself back upright and jot down all that Erikson and Piaget. 

-

Class lets out late, and the walk back is somehow colder than it was this morning. Leaves roll over the grass and crumple under the soles of your shoes as you huddle towards the quad again. Every intake of air feels icily sharp in your mouth.

You finally check your phone to find a couple notifications from Abby: one asking when you’ll be out, then the other saying she left the library to get a few budgeting forms cleared for film club– which she was the sparkling and invested vice president of.

So you head to your next, shorter class: Intro to Botany. Mandatory to the Environmental Science majors, but an elective for you. It’s half as long as your lecture this morning, more hands on, and you get to see Andrew again. If he doesn’t decide to skip, that is.

Morrill Hall is all glass and brick and stairs and labs, and home to the lone science course you deigned to enroll in this semester. You duck into a classroom, the knuckles of your hand resting protectively over your red and chilled nose. The heat isn’t on in this building yet either, and this is slowly morphing into a sore point of contention for you. 

Which is to say, it really, really sucks.

Your fingers soon unfold into a wave as you spot Andrew across the room, smiling at you from where the side of his head was flush against his part of the table you usually share. He’s either happy to see you because you’re close, or because you look pretty silly right now.

You drop down beside him, slide a folder from your backpack and onto the glossy, laminate countertop– then kind of kick your bag as under the table as you can get it.

“I’m hungry. Dan, I’m so hungry it hurts.” 

“Then let’s get something after this,” you rejoin. You have no doubt he’s keeping the exaggeration to a minimum right now. But, almost more importantly, “Wow. I think I didn’t have more than a sip of coffee today, actually.” Your gut feels a bit on the concave side, when you designate it the moment of thoughtful contemplation. 

You sit in whatever discomfort you’ve been compartmentalizing until now, brushing your hand from the cold tip of your nose to the flushed heat of your cheek, and you’re hoping that you make it. That the next hour and a half doesn’t kill you.

“Well, I’m not pushing it today. Take good notes, alright?” Andrew yawns, before letting his crusty eyes drift shut in angelic slumber.

Damn it. That’s what you were planning to do– to nap this class out. Your own lids feel heavy enough you imagine you’re actually squinting. 

“Whuh?” you mumble in confusion. And after your initial disorientation, you try to better enunciate your protest.

Eyeing the professor coming in and setting their things down, somehow already having a student in tow asking them questions, stirs you into restarting. “You can’t even read my handwriting.” 

“You get this more than I do,” he huffs, not even opening his eyes again. “I’ll pay for lunch.” He turns his head away from you, then adds an arm over it when the professor starts diagramming stem and root structures on the board– each line of chalk accompanied by its own upsetting screech. 

Ughh.

You copy everything that seems important by hand in your worn, suede notebook, especially anything that gets the distinction of being outlined on the board.

...and you don’t tell Andrew that, for maybe fifteen minutes in the middle, you fell asleep too.

-

You and Andrew arrive by the tree and flyer podium you had all previously convened at this morning. It’s almost 2pm now. With palpable excitement, you park yourselves in the grass and set to work in rummaging through your plastic take away bags, brimming with fresh bagels kept warm in tin foil and bottles of juice. 

Maybe you both overdid it... though that’s not terribly important to either of you right now. Right now you’re biting into toasted poppyseed bread and cashew cream cheeze with primal satisfaction.

“Thanks,” you say, managing to get a couple words out between what you’re scarfing down.

Andrew gives you a look, as if he’s thinking about rolling his eyes, but then, after swallowing, blows a cloud of steam into the chilly air towards you. “I couldn’t live with under-appreciating you.”

He was never your most sensitive friend, there was a lot that seemed to go over his head– but you were always able to count on him making you feel normal. A feeling that has lately become its own kind of physical need. 

“Hey, Dan, how about slowing down? You’re e– whoah!”

You cut Andrew short as a dry bagel chunk gets lodged in your throat. You try to cough it out violently, while your friend starts smacking the flat of his palm against your back in a way that definitely hurt way more than it helped. You’re more embarrassed at the commotion than in any tangible pain.

“Oh my god–” Cough. “Please... stop!” You cough again, pushing him away before he unintentionally knocks any more air out of you. Andrew doesn’t seem entirely convinced of your welfare, but doesn’t push.

“I guess I should be glad that you have an appetite.”

It takes a long moment for you to gather yourself enough to talk again.  “Huh... why?” You ask before really thinking about it. Then you think about it, and the sudden self-consciousness makes you brush it off by breaking your bleary eye contact. 

And in typical Andrew fashion, he really delivers by letting you. Avoiding looking at him in a spell of quiet mortification draws no remarks.

You talk about video games. Or rather, Andrew talks about Breath Of The Wild and you listen and widen your eyes and give an encouraging nod each time he looks to you for acknowledgement. You learned your lesson participating the first time; you really thought that the main character’s name would have been Zelda. 

You never really got into that series as a kid. You were always more about those Japanese horror games instead, but you don’t mind getting the low down of what Andrew likes. You enjoy letting him steer.

There was a time, back when you first met him, that you thought you had a crush on him. But, he quickly revealed himself more naturally as a friend. Not to mention he was painfully straight. 

Pretty much as soon as you met him at the beginning of the semester last year he already had a few girls in casual rotation. He looked like a huge jock, complete with varsity jacket and all– though for what you had no clue, because there was no way it was for any team he was part of or not. The last time Andrew cared about sports was probably back collecting baseball cards in elementary school.

Andrew supplied nothing but dork when he opened his mouth, which he balanced out with the fact that he seldom piped up about anything. He wasn’t stupid, but the usual glaze over his blue eyes and semi-permanent thousand yard stare made him seem like more of a space cadet than he was. The fact that he gushed so often about Nintendo and had a round, rosy face that hadn’t yet caught up with all the muscular bulk definitely gave him... a sort of man-child vibe at times. And the freckles. 

He was objectively cute. 

And despite all the shallow aspects of his demeanor that might make you think he was uninvested about most things, he was so strangely and consistently kind-hearted in an understated way. You could never tell if he hadn’t noticed your goo goo eyes in the beginning, or if he gave you an easy out in pretending he didn’t. 

While your attraction was surface and easily gotten over, your compatibility as friends proved to be more substantive and real. This is something that never bothered you; you think you need him more as a friend anyway.

You notice Andrew suddenly perking up, looking off to something behind you, and you turn your own face to see what it is. You catch the telltale slip of auburn hair, braided low and cascading over a shoulder with a scrunchie, chipped lavender nails, and toothy smile.

“Hey, Abby!” Andrew calls out to her beside you. It feels like his energy level just rocketed itself up; you just manage to stop yourself from wincing. 

And though you thought Andrew’s unusual enthusiasm would give Abby reason to pause, it didn’t. You felt for a second that maybe you were missing something. Not the strangest conclusion you could’ve come to, considering your recent lack of physical and mental presence. 

You could also just be tired, which you are, so maybe you’re just being overly perceptive in a weird way.

“Sorry I took so long, let’s go!” Abby chirps, stalling in front of you just long for you to pull yourself up and swipe the bagel crumbs and dirt off your jeans. And then you go. 

The two of you are almost shoulder to shoulder as you walk, traveling in an easy, familiar silence through the paved pathways of the quad on the way to her dorm. You don’t have to travel in the cold for too long, as her residential hall was on campus. A historical brick and mortar building– tucked in a sparse cluster of golden Autumn trees, it almost calls to mind the memory of your own home. 

You draw closer to the brick and soaring white, wooden pillars, and the both of you pick up your leisurely pace a bit as a smaller group of students just exit the building. Your cold-chafed hands scramble up the antique side railings of the front steps, rushing to catch the door that the last of them holds open for you in a gesture of unthinking politeness. 

The ground floor of the dorm looks more like the historical reading room of a library, all the overstuffed chairs with nauseating floral upholstery and scuffed ornate tables and pastel walls. You both stop by the the front desk so that Abby can sign you in as a guest. Despite it being a female-only dorm, Abby was able to snag (and afford) a single room– which allowed you to avoid feeling any more strangely guilty for imposing as a guest.

You find yourself distracted by the now dead violets in a windowsill planter, brown and drooping even though you saw someone plant them only last week.

Then you choose to survey the sheer amount of Halloween decorations saturating the ground floor common area instead: construction paper bats and witches and cheap, shiny black tinsel garlands tracing every inch of the ceiling moldings. The chronically bored looking girl behind the counter wrestles around an array of plastic Jack-O-Lanterns to hand back your IDs to Abby.

Five smiling pumpkin faces did very little to diminish the glaring lack of one on the girl’s face; you had probably just interrupted her catching up on a homework assignment... or studying. At this point in the semester, a brief glance around was all that was needed to spot a number of students pouring over textbooks in the lobby, in near total silence but for the one or two group study sessions going on. It was the total opposite of Andrew’s dorm, _for sure_. You chose to stay with Abby for as long as possible during the week for more reason than your close friendship. 

After the whole sign-in process, the both of you make your way over to one of the hallway’s side doors that led to a stairwell for you to make your trek up to the third floor.

Abby’s room was in a corner room on the right. You hoist both of your bags back up your shoulder from where they had been slipping from the sheer weight, as she fished around in her jean pockets for her key card– and then in the compartments of her bag that you were holding. You try not to grunt under the burden you’re holding, staggering your legs for better footing and turning your face the other way so she can’t see how dismayed you look. You think that Abby might have decided to bring fifteen pounds of club supplies, in addition to her textbooks, along for the morning.

After maybe a full minute of delay, she finds her card at long last, and you shoulder the door open for her when she reaches to retrieves her bag from you. You slouch in after her, throwing down your bag next to hers by the doorway. 

One wall of her small, rectangular bedroom was punctuated by a few modest windows, and when Abby turns around to check on you, the side of her round face is bathed in pale, cloud filtered afternoon light.

“You up for studying together before you have to leave?” She asks, giving you an unobtrusive once over that still makes you check if there’s still any bagel crumbs on you. You’re good.

“I...uh, I actually really want to lay down...” you admit with a hint of sheepishness in your tone. You have three hours until you have to leave for your Ancient Philosophy class, and you had been intending to use your break to finish the reading for today, but your head felt so foggy you honestly didn’t know if you were up to it right now. You think Abby could tell.

“Okay, well I’ll lay down with ya then,” she says, “I woke up at 5 today, if we nap now then we can have a study session tonight.” Sounds like a plan.

“Sounds like a plan.”

You stare at the floor with faltering eyes while Abby kicks off her shoes by yours and gets into the twin bed, snuggling underneath the comforter before holding it up for you.

You crawl wordlessly onto the small bed beside her, facing her desk and windows with Abby between you and the wall, and she covers the both of you with the blanket. It’s cramped, the bed is obviously meant for only one person, and Abby sidles up behind you; you both exhale in unison. 

This is so cozy.

You two usually slept like this when you stayed over– if you hadn’t passed out on the floor while doing schoolwork.

It’s hard to move, but you manage to will yourself to pull out your phone from your pocket and set an alarm so you don’t accidentally miss your next class. And now you can put it out of your mind. Then you toss it onto the bedding and let it get lost in the tangle of sheets somewhere around your legs. 

You lay like that for a while, just breathing and resting without actually sleeping. For some reason you can’t drift any deeper, but the room and bed are so warm compared to school and outside and you can smell some of the faded lavender Abby spritzed after changing her sheets. She hums and slips an arm over you as you nest together. You feel warm as you peer lazily at the trees and the brick side of a building past the windows. 

You take in all the photos taped to the walls and old movie posters and potted plants on the floor and sills, a few half full water bottles littered around them. You look at the mess of papers and books on her desk. The fairy lights above that she kept on day and night.

You’re aware of how tense you were and how your shoulders had been hunching, more than slightly, as you relax into the mattress and Abby’s hug.

“Dan... I think you need a haircut.” Abby lightly tugs a lock of hair at the nape of your neck. While you were gazing around the room and outside the windows, you guess it makes sense that Abby’s been looking at the back of your head.

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to. I’m just putting it off,” you reply, the usual, nonsensical self-consciousness and guilt would be creeping in if it wasn’t for the fact that Abby put you at such ease. How she said things, her calm energy, her easy openness. Just being around her helped.

“I can do it for you. Hopefully make it look good for Friday.” 

Oh, yeah. 

You sigh audibly, exhaustedly. “I completely forgot about that.”

Your group had been planning to go to this big Halloween party that Ben was going to throw with his roommates at their off-campus house. And knowing Ben, even as little as you think you did, you’re sure there wasn’t going to be anything half-assed about it; the party would be packed.

Abby holds you, brushing off your forgetfulness without a even hitch. Maybe she’s used to it. “We’ve been texting about it all weekend on the group text, you should check it out later. I’m going as a witch.”

“You already have your costume?”

“Yeah. We’re all going as classic Halloween things, so it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up something last minute if you don’t have one. Or you can DIY it if ya want to.”

Grasping at the lone straw available to you in this moment, you implore: “Can I just borrow your fangs from last year?”

“Nope. Lea’s already going as a vampire.”

You sigh in Abby’s arms, out of resignation this time, knowing that you’re going to probably have to trek to some sort of party store by the weekend.

But she finds your stress funny enough, and you think you can almost hear her smiling behind you. “It’ll be fun! I’ll come with you, maybe ask Andrew and Jason if they want to go tomorrow or something too.”

You feel warm. A small, rolling sense of appreciation wells in your chest. That Abby is so patient with you, that she cares and isn’t frustrated and markedly over your lack of enthusiasm and low energy and isolating tendencies. 

Yet, the fact that you forgot something that meant so much to your friends starts suffusing your chest with guilt. Guilt, but not surprise. You’re not sure how you feel towards the awareness that you’ve become more or less accustomed to this for yourself.

This low bar of being– seems more and more familiar as the days go on, and you’re afraid to start self-reflecting enough to realize you’re getting worse. 

And the realization of getting worse only leads to the recognition of there not being enough strength in you to start getting better. There’s no love in you for being like this, so it’s hard to expect that capability from others. You try not to bring it up.

“Thank you,” you quietly say. It’s all you feel you _can_ say. 

She hums in response, again, never giving any overt sign of being exasperated with you. You want to feel like it’s not selfish to hope that how she seems is how she is. That she’ll speak up when she can’t stand holding you together so you can ignore your ever gnawing sense of being an intrusion.

You want to be able to differentiate being tired of yourself and being quite literally very tired more than you do, but they’ve become coalesced into one heavy blob of a feeling. 

Here’s hoping that having your eyes closed while you get lost in the mire of feeling like shit counts as rest for you because, for some reason, you’re getting the sense that it’s going to be the best you can manage for yourself today.

Abby continues talking about her classes and her weekend while you chime in whenever you can keep up with all the activities that greedily swallow up all her time. The extracurricular clubs, the hangouts with your group, working through the beginning stages of a short film that’s been eating away at her usually pristine sleep schedule. She’s wondering about sets and lenses and who she can get to do the music on her nonexistent budget.

Your brain stirs. 

“You can ask Paul.” 

It’s easy to surmise that Abby already had him in mind; he was the only musician your group knew and was friendly with– and a skilled classical music major at that. 

“I don’t have to,” Abby responds with less apprehension than you expected. “If he agreed, he’d be over all the time then...” she adds, trailing off with a note of muted finality. 

That’s when you decide to finally turn over to face her, and her hands move in tandem to rewrap the two of you in covers once more. There’s a little more distance between you than before, so you can see each other’s faces and have some room to breathe. Abby’s expression is calm and open, her eyebrows hitched imperceptibly upwards. You’re not sure what else you had been bracing for.

You’re trying not to look upset as you speak, and hope what slips through can just be attributed to... whatever else. You had the kind of mouth that always seemed to look like it was smiling, the corners subtly tilted upwards even through foreign film tears or excruciating injuries or through all the daily situations that you experienced as nothing other than deeply and privately uncomfortable. “We just went on one date and he turned out to not be into me.” 

You actually thought it went fine, more than fine, even. His rare smiling face and the few times you made him laugh have been intrusive thoughts of yours ever since. But then he texted you the next day to let you know he was seeing someone else.

“And I don’t feel like that’s enough to make you miss out on someone that could help you with your art,” you continue, insisting.

You can’t deny that it feels good to diminish what was a painful train-wreck of your first romantic excursion since... what happened with your dad. And you don’t want to sink so low that you let any of it bring Abby and her creative endeavors down with you. 

“We can talk about it more later, if you want to... but thanks though for saying that. Really.” She’s definitely relieved that you’re starting to seem like you might be getting over Paul. And you kind of are. Forcing yourself into situations where you have to be normal or else feel overwhelmingly disappointed with yourself feels like it has the potential for positive change. Maybe. 

You at least stop avoiding looking at her long enough to give her as much of smile you can muster without it feeling foreign and dismal on your face. Long, vertical lines indent themselves on either side of your tired mouth. “I’m sorry for all of my bullshit.” 

Feeling guilty is a hard mode to get out of. You’re beginning to feel it more and more around other people.You’re afraid that you feel so badly that it’s impossible that it’s not smearing onto everyone around you. Even though– 

You’re afraid to confirm that you’ve been shoveling negativity onto her, when you tell yourself you’re just being honest. Even though you barely even want to talk about anything to begin with, some things you can’t just keep inside because you’re really starting to run out of room in there.

You muster enough strength to meet (what you fear to be) her x-ray eyes. 

She just looks sad. 

It makes your stomach drop. You really don’t know what to say to her. Would she find it annoying if you apologized again? You’re annoying yourself. You feel your body start tensing anew, low in your back and creeping upwards.

“Dan, I think you should move on campus– be here with all of us,” as firm as her words are, the look she gives is imploring and soft. 

You quietly release whatever breath you’d been holding in; this is so far from what you expected to hear. 

“It doesn’t make sense that you’re living and working so far away, I mean I know it’s expensive to move... and you have a house... but you can get a job here, maybe even work at school. Getting an off campus apartment with some roommates would be even cheaper than that.”

“...yeah?” You kinda want to leave it at that, shrug it off. But, you know she’s right. It’s not like you’re paying for your house at all anyway, so it wouldn’t be too hard to swing for you financially. “I just want to live here with you. You think they’d make an exception for me to move in?” Though you’re obviously kidding, you secretly and unequivocally feel that way for sure.

And maybe she could tell, because your joke didn’t roll off as quickly as you thought it would. Abby just stares at you, mouth in a faint frown, hand fidgeting with the woolen hem of your sleeve. 

You never have to wonder about what she’s thinking for long. “If you moved here, I would live with you.”

...

That... makes whatever cloud over you undeniably lighter. 

“You don’t have to do that for me...”

“Oh shut up,” she closes the slim distance between the two of you in a wavelength of movement, both arms extended towards you until they cross behind your back and envelop you in a hug. “Do you even know how lonely I am without you here?” You don’t like hearing about that, her feeling bad, but at the same time it somehow seems too good to be true.

“Do you remember last year? The roommate from hell?” You do. It was bad, but you didn’t do much more than listen. Though you guess your friend group was too small and less established then for anyone else to give that to her. Her arms give you a firm squeeze, and you close your eyes. 

“Mhm.” You mumble, chin nestled in the crook of her neck and shoulder and soft hair. You feel like a kid, just inhaling and letting her talk because you’re too overwhelmed to really.

“I was way worse than whatever way you think you’re being right now. And you were there for me, and now I’m here for you. But not because I think I owe you or whatever... I want to be.”

Your eyes are dry, but whatever space occupies inside your ribcage is warm and melting. “Thank you,” you say. A broken record, but you keep saying it because you mean it. 

Your alarm finally goes off, and you half-jump in Abby’s arms at the sudden noise. 

She helps you fish around the bed to find it, fumbling to silence it, and you both smile– so much easier this time– when you meet eyes again.

“C’mon, let’s get you checked out of here.”

-

You listen to music as you walk. Untangled earbuds in each ear and Socrates and Plato in your bag. The sky is just a flat wash of pale grey, and this time of the year even 3pm starts getting dim. In the twilight, the rows of lanterns that line the paved concrete paths among the stiff grass are already lit. 

There’s a considerable number of students milling around for afternoon classes, chatting and ducking into buildings or trekking back to dormitories. People lay in the grass just because there’s no snow on it yet. 

You head into a brick building and climb up an oak-bannistered stairwell. Walk through a darkly tiled corridor until you reach the ajar door of room 316.

Your eyes immediately scan for Jason and find him in his usual desk at the far wall of the room by the windows. You take your usual seat right next to him. There weren’t any actual assigned seats for the class, but the two of you were consistent in sitting together. He plucks his backpack easily from the seat he’d been saving for you, and you set yourself down in its place– in front of a girl who glances up at your arrival. You’re not totally sure about it, but you think she seems to sit in the same seat every day too. 

Jason’s textbook lies neatly and precisely placed in the center of his desk, closed. You imagine it’s because he already highlighted and marked up all the margins ahead of time. He’s in no rush.

Which, is unfortunately not the case for you. You’re kind of fucked. 

But, at least, only with your assignments; whatever notes you’ve taken in class have kept you decently informed of where you’re at in the curriculum and what you’ll probably be tested on for your midterms. Even so, you hope no one’s going to check since it’s your review class. You should have written down some questions, but Jason usually has your back and has been your constant study partner, group project member, and term paper reviewer since your class together another semester ago. The two of you have an entire tried and true system pretty firmly in place, which, even for pre or post class socializing, neither of you have to venture out of your arrangement for.

You don’t personally know Jason all that well, but just talking to him... is nice? He was a Philosophy Major like you, and his reticence would rival yours for sure, if not for the fact that he was always reading some nonfiction New York Times bestseller, or watching feature length YouTube videos on Sociology and History, in his spare time that he wanted to share with you. Your interests were more honed, specific– but he was the kind of person who was interested in, and wanted to know about, pretty much everything.

As soon as you sit down, say ‘hey,’ and go through the brief rundown of each other’s weekends– you’re vague about yours, but no more vague than usual– he informs you about the new strain of Polio that had reemerged in the the States, before switching to what robots in Japan are now capable of this month. You’re learning a lot. 

Abby asking to live with you is still echoing softly in your mind, and you feel more present and high-functioning and warm.

All you did during the weekend was work and sleep and kind of eat– you genuinely appreciate getting to listen without having to cop to how much you’ve been living in a hole. While he talks, he fiddles absentmindedly with the split ends of his long, sleek hair, and you rest the side of your face in your hand, your wide mouth cracked into a fond smile. You chime back about some new recipes you learned in the kitchen of your part-time job. About the books you’re in the middle of reading right now– _Rebecca_ and _Frankenstein._ For fun. You don’t mention the hike.

Apparently, Abby already messaged the group chat about going costume shopping tomorrow– Jason brings it up by saying that he’s coming along with you guys, and that he already called mummy.

It’s not before long that class starts, and you’re forced to put the Jason update temporarily on hold. The test review unfolds, and the bunch of you ask as many questions as you can before the hour’s up. Everyone raises their hand at least once, including you.

After you ask your requisite question about The Allegory of the Cave and jot down in your notes your professor in turn scrawls on the blackboard, you feel something roll over the carpet and hit the back of your heel.

You peer down at the pencil beside your shoe and bend down to pick it up– before your hand suddenly brushes with someone else’s.

Your eyes lock with the girl who sits behind you. Her hand withdraws enough to let you return it to her, and she mutters a soft ‘thank you’ with an abashed smile. You nod curtly, giving a conciliatory smile of your own in response, then turn back around.

Jason’s in the middle of asking his third question before you hear the telltale clamor of unzipping and notebooks shutting and folders being stuffed into bags. 

With a glance to check the clock, your teacher dismisses the rest of the class and wishes you all luck– and while your classmates start trickling out, he continues to answer Jason’s question. You stand up, gathering your things, but wait for him. 

Then the both of you leave, picking your conversation right back up where you had left off.

-

Jason walks you halfway through the quad before you end up parting ways; you complete the rest of your short journey to Abby’s dorm on your own. 

You usually message her to pick up up when you get to the entrance, but when you squint through the glass you see that no one’s at the front desk– so you slink in with a smaller group of students into the lobby and up the stairwell. No one really gives a shit, which is ideal for you.

You hike up to the third floor and stop in front of that corner room door. Knock. You wait maybe ten seconds before you hear hurried shuffling on the other side, then the door creaks open. 

Abby’s not surprised that you snuck in this time; rather, she’s happy to see you. “What do you wanna order for tonight?” The words you’ve been waiting all those hours for. You order Thai.

Crossing the doorway, you toss your bag down by the foot of her desk for the last time today. And then you flop down on the floor next to it for what you hope is the last time today, too. You don’t want to have to get up until after dinner. 

A loud thud sounds off right beside you, and to your quiet chagrin you eye the stack of books _you knew_ were coming, but you had been avoiding in your thoughts. Sadly, there’s no avoiding it for long.

Your study sessions with Abby were probably the most effective way of easing into the workload. She could just eat in the cafeteria downstairs, but she was kind of tired of the food there too and wanted some ceremonial takeout for the long night ahead. You are truly thankful for that.

It takes about half an hour before the food arrives, so the two of you play some music and talk blissfully about nothing the way this stage of your friendship allows until Abby needs to hurry downstairs to intercept the deliveryman in the lobby. When she returns, hefty paper bag cradled in her arms, you’re already sitting cross-legged on the ground, waiting for her to join you. 

She settles across from you, and the food is still steaming so you have to work quickly when your fingers fumble to rip open the stapled bags. It’s hot, but soon the scent of lemongrass and stir-fry is wafting up into the cozy room. Abby gets red curry (jasmine rice), you get tofu pad see ew (no egg). You mirror each other, food at your sides and your laptops and books densely arranged in the center. You’re not in any of the same classes together, at least not anymore, but it’s easier to focus with the company. You sigh after long stretches of silence and quiz each other and hand off different colored highlighters.

It’s a couple hours in, and after Abby retrieves her flashcards from the depths of her backpack, flinging a number of film club folders up onto the desk to get them out of way, when she finally feels assured enough of her progress to lower the wall of silence. You, having way more free time than she does during the school week to study, don’t feel as anxious about exam prep.

“I think I’m good, basically...” she breathes, tapping some flashcards on a book cover to realign them. You don’t try to sell her on making a Quizlet account anymore. 

You keep typing in the absence of her saying anything further, but after a minute your hands slow to a stop once more. You look up. Abby’s thumb and index finger are perched above the bridge of her long nose. Her eyes are on her own screen, but they seem... blank.

“What’s up?” It’s you who asks this time, but you’re not really asking.

“...It’s so weird.” She sounds amused. Tired– which could very well be from the studying. Her hand falls from her face to rummage inside the paper bag to pick at her last crab rangoon. Her remark doesn’t make you feel any less in the dark, and you feel you owe it to her to return her persistence with you with some of your own. 

You press. “What is?”

She shoots you a pointed look, hand still searching the takeout container, careless sounds of crinkling plastic. “Andrew didn’t tell you anything during lunch today?”

“Not really, why?”

“I think he’s going to ask me out on Friday.”

“Oh...” Briefly pouring over your interactions during lunch, then last week... the thought crossed your mind a few times, but you hadn’t taken it too seriously. You guess it makes sense? “Did he tell you that this morning when I came in?”

“Nah, that was something else, probably related... he wanted to have breakfast together. He told Lea though and asked her to keep it a secret.”

Ahh.

Even though you had been commuting this morning, it was hard to not feel sort of left out at the breakfast thing. Or the prospect of the two other members of your trio being in a relationship. 

You try not to clam up. “Well... do you feel the same way?”

“Maybe? I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it,” she replies, almost... sidestepping. You can’t tell if you’re being paranoid, but something about the tone of her voice makes you think that she’s phrasing things for your benefit.

You couldn’t help but feel somewhat disappointed. It wasn’t jealousy; you didn’t feel that way about either of them. But you didn’t feel ready for that to potentially happen. _But_ , you also felt you shouldn’t allow yourself to feel that way either? 

There wasn’t really any good way to want your friends, whose happiness you genuinely cared about, to intervene on their own happiness for your own sake. Especially over something like this. You’re pretty sure them dating wouldn’t actually change much.

Maybe, more than left out, you felt a little disassociated over having been so out of the loop over the past number of weeks? Months? Andrew wasn’t skilled at all in hiding how he felt about anything, so you can’t help but think how you would have probably noticed by now if you hadn’t been so despondent and unresponsive. Or maybe he would have asked you about it– instead of Lea.

How many months is it going to take you before you get over it? There's no foreseeable answer to that.

No doubt taking your muteness as a bad sign, she continues, “It’s not really worth thinking about...”

She’s right. But, what you’re focusing on about this is probably different than what she thinks, and you can’t find it in yourself to articulate to her exactly how. 

So after a few minutes of silence– except for the sound of sporadic typing– you change the subject to something less weird for the two of you. You ask about her clubs, you talk about her family, and whenever Andrew comes up again, you don’t make it weird. You don’t want Abby to feel guilty for no reason, or rather a stupid reason– and you want to avoid mentally stewing in anything that makes you feel that way either.

After half an hour, you’re already joking about the crush, and all is thankfully forgotten.

Your study session, with many ‘efficiency breaks’ peppered in, lasts for maybe a couple more hours before you realize that the two of you are doing more zoning out at computer screens than typing and that your eye strain is mounting to a degree where it’s hard to concentrate on little else. You bring up ending for the night at the same time. 

It’s Monday, you’re both still easing into the mental endurance necessary to juggle your designated workloads.

Abby ducks out to go brush her teeth down the hall, leaving you to change out of your clothes and into the wrinkled t-shirt and sweats you brought from home. Serious consideration is given to just settling yourself in the bed straight away and postpone washing up until the morning. You think about it. Then you remember that you’re trying to not look like you’re a mess, even if it is the truth. 

So, as usual when you’re here, you head out to go find one of the all-girl dorm’s required unisex bathrooms. Ziploc of your scant toiletries in hand.

By the time you return, ten minutes later, Abby is finishing cleaning up the remains of dinner. You stow your things under the bed again, moving aside when she proceeds to crawl up onto the mattress, and following right after. You turn to face away from her so you don’t end up breathing in each other’s faces as you fall asleep tonight, and she reaches over to unplug the cord for the fairy lights.

The room shudders into one long stretch of shadow, except for the faint glow of the campus lamplights filtering from outside the drawn plastic shades.

As a prelude to dozing off, you whisper to each other through a thickening veneer of drowsiness. The stretches of just the sounds of you breathing stretch on as the minutes pass in darkness. The comforter is drawn almost completely over your mouth, and the sharp tip of your nose only meets worn cotton sheets and the thick, woolen yarn of Abby’s indigo throw.

“Hey, Dan?” Abby’s voice softly murmurs into the back of your shoulder. The end of your name lilts off as if she’s testing to see if you’re still awake.

“...Mm?” Barely aware of anything, you teeter either at the edge of sleep or stumble in and out of thin slips of it. Your breath has slowed considerably.

“How’s your Mom been doing? I haven’t heard you talk about her in a while...”

The fabric cradling the lower half of your face swallows up every inch of your wounded exhale. 

It’s a normal thing to ask. But you wish you had fallen asleep that few seconds sooner to avoid it– to prolong answering questions like this. The short-sided selfishness is not lost on you. It gnaws into your insides. 

“I don’t know.” _How stupid is that?_

“You should try checking up on her tomorrow. Maybe call her?”

You don’t know why exactly your stomach turns the way it does, and what exactly you’re avoiding. “Yeah... I should.” It feels like surrendering or confessing.

It’s enough to finally knock you out for the rest of the night; what sleep you fall into is definitely less restful than it would have been before, but, nonetheless, the break from consciousness is a relief.

-

When you wake up again, something doesn’t feel right. Cognition returns to you in gradual waves: it’s bright, one side of your face is numb from being smushed up against a pillow for probably several hours. One of your eyelashes had fallen into your eye, forcing you to try blinking it from out of your eyelid; it burns and makes the vision in your right eye blurred with tears. You’re alone. 

Abby’s morning class.

You squeeze your eyes closed. Try to force the lash towards your tear duct and maybe fall back asleep since your alarm hadn’t gone off yet. And it doesn’t take much longer to start drifting again– you hadn’t woken up that much to begin with, anyway. 

But, as tired as your are, you only edge at sleep. It’s comfortable, so you don’t deliberate on why, but then the unsettling feeling that woke you in the first place persists.

There’s a sound behind you, even and deep. You lay, eyes still closed. It almost sounds like a shuddering vacuum of air, then a dragging release of it, right behind your head. You’re too tired to get up, so you just float and keep listening to the same sound cycle itself.

But... the longer you listen, the more it sounds like... breathing? 

The realization snaps your eyes wide open and sends you bolting upwards in a way that forces you to grab the headboard of the bed to keep from rolling off the edge of the mattress. You don’t know what is it you think you’re expecting to see.

There’s no one there.

Your eyes slowly wander across the small bedroom, as if making absolutely sure, before eventually landing on a thrumming radiator– the now obvious culprit of the off-putting noise. 

The dormitory heating had been finally turned on– the official marker for Autumn if there ever was one– and the amount of disuse had sent the machinery shaking and sputtering to life overnight. You probably hadn’t immediately noticed its cacophony since your ears had gotten used to it as you slept.

Sitting up, your knuckles relax the stranglehold they had kept on the headboard, and you set a controlled rhythm as you breathe in and out. 

You decide to get up and get dressed. 

You throw on a fresh set of clothes, another cuffed pair of pants and a navy button-down you cover up again with your dark green cable-knit sweater, and drag a few textbooks from under the bed to put in your bag. 

To keep the bedroom door propped open, so you can get back in again without Abby, you drag over the lone desk chair kept in the room. You hurry across the hall to brush your teeth and rake your dark hair behind your ears. Gloss over the worsening undereye bags with an absentminded glance, then sneak out of the building with a wave of other students into the cool and early morning. 

-

Another December 9am class has you up and out, while the pale light filtering through the clouds above you floats down in hazy streaks of either pure white or faded grey. You’re bustling in the cold on your way to your Ottoman Empire class, walking shoulder to shoulder with the especially puffy puffer jacket of the person brushing up beside you, probably making their pilgrimage to the same building together unknowingly. 

All of the purposefully planted trees around the walkways, all the coats and bags and shaded school buildings, seemed all at once to be both dim and glowing. A scattering of vaguely familiar faces intermingled in the small crowd of students drawing closer to Lincoln Hall. Class slots this early aren’t very popular, you suppose your recognition comes from the eventual repetition of seeing these same trudging people so many times by now.

You think about what Abby said last night as you were falling asleep, and your phone feels important and heavy in the pocket of your jeans. The thought of calling your mom sends your brain reeling with some formless yet highly reactive anxiety. 

Avoiding, for just _one more_ _day_ , is so tempting– almost an automatic response from how frequently you shove it aside because of school and work then school again... but, you know you need to at least make an effort with the tentative thread of communication you’ve been trying to keep.

Suffering so deeply, in the way that you are, might have given you a pass. If not for the fact that you weren’t suffering alone.

Finally, you fish out your phone and fumble with cold, stiff fingers to enter your passcode and fidget with the keyboard. You decide to send your mom a text message. Even if it wasn’t your voice, it felt like a step.

You send a quick and innocuous _‘Hi, I miss you’_

Then, stacking underneath it: _‘I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping in touch. How are you doing??’_

Walking while you type doesn’t exactly help you phrase things perfectly, but it somehow still helps by keeping you distracted enough to not let your guilt start crippling your fingers. 

You put the phone back in your pocket, walking a bit faster now as the start time of your class becomes more imminent. Everyone around you seems to have the same idea, too; the building’s entrance is congested with students flashing IDs to a lone security guard. He blindly waves you through, and virtually anyone else entering except for the unfortunate, seemingly random kids he spies with out of date cards. You’re about to enter your classroom in one of the second floor wings, slowing by the tail-end of a mini line by the door, when you feel a _buzz_. 

Honestly, you weren’t expecting to have had to feel it so soon. But, maybe with the time difference of wherever she is, her free moment happened to have lined up with yours. You pull out your phone and flick a thumb across the screen to read her reply.

_‘Fine.’_

That’s not great, is it? It’s certainly not very relieving of any guilt you felt from falling into your pathetic little stretches of isolation– again– it just slowly builds in the back stores of worry that is your usual white noise. She didn’t ignore you, but the lack of detail or enthusiasm in her response gave it the same feeling. 

Maybe she’s mad at you. Maybe she’s just busy, and none the unhappier for it. Exploring cities abroad, seeing old friends, resting in beautiful countrysides–with you a distantly fond memory, a hazy thought with no negative feelings tied to it. 

At least you tried to talk to her. Then you try not to think about it anymore, only silently promising yourself you’ll try again tomorrow. 

You turn through the doorway, already heading towards the usual empty seat beside Lea. The body of your bag thunking into your back with each step as it hangs by a single, haphazard strap on your shoulder.

It’s finally warm in one of your classrooms– muffled metallic creaks sputter from the radiators lining a wall, right under the windows. You and Lea say hi, briefly joke around, and then mutually fully ignore each other, dazed in your seats for different reasons, until the professor finally starts.

-

When you step outside again, it’s raining. The drops fall full and steady into a thickening mist hovering above the grass. You fumble for the compact umbrella you usually keep stowed away in one of the open side pockets of your backpack. You undo the velcro fastener and slide the mechanism at the base of the handle upwards until the dark synthetic pleats fully extend themselves in a sheltering arc over your head. You stand there, just out of the way from the entrance of one of the school’s smaller, departmental libraries and listen to the faint splashes of cars driving through the wet roads beyond campus.

After Ottoman Empire, you had walked to a cafeteria and picked over a cup of soup by yourself, ferried some books over from Abby’s dorm, then rebounded to your usual study spot in a quiet corner of the music library. The past few hours till now were spent hunched over in a dusty cubicle, getting a head start on all the homework and exam prep you knew you’d never get to at home. But, you liked the old wooden desks and how this library seldom ever had more than four people using it at a time. 

You’re waiting for Abby to text you back; you’re planning on going costume shopping tonight– if you remember correctly. Now you’re left wondering where to meet up. You’d have already walked over to your usual spot on the quad if there was any kind of cover from the weather over there.

Tapping out of your text inbox, you click around your home screen in a trance, then one thing leading into another... you’re inevitably drawn into the mesmerizing lure of social media. You do more scrolling than posting, for sure– though lately you haven’t been doing even much of that. You find your invite to the party pretty quickly, and see yourself referenced several times in your group chat... when’s the last time you actually checked any of this?

You’re going through a number of pictures you’ve been tagged in over the past number of weeks, and you stop scrolling when you catch up to a photo of you from last semester: your red-eyed and widely grinning profile and a table completely littered with empty and half empty bottles at a tapas bar you all went to, to celebrate... something. Abby is leaned over, either kissing the side of your face or whispering something to you, and Andrew bookends your other side, his sweaty arm flung over your shoulders and his eyes screwed shut with laughter. 

When’s the last time you all hung out like that? Wasted and smiling and carefree? Memory lane is about to send you spiraling, when, as is if to snap you out of it, a familiar voice calls out to you from afar. 

You spot Andrew up ahead at the edge of the quad, waving wildly with one hand to get your attention while the other holds onto the bomber jacket he has draped over his head protectively, trying to keep at least the top half of himself from getting wet. You pocket your phone quickly and run-walk over to him so he can lead the both of you to where the others are meeting up. You think it’s a cool coincidence that he found you– until he reveals that Abby (being the friend that knows you, and how boring you are, the best) told him to check here first.

The two of you end up convening with Abby and Jason outside the Illini Union building; Abby had just finished up with club duties and is checking her bank account while Jason... is also checking his bank account. 

You keep your arm raised a little higher than you usually would, trying to keep the rain off of both yourself and Andrew, who busies himself by straightening the wet front of his hair with a clawed hand. He manages a bad job of it, but not bad enough for anyone to point it out or particularly care.

The small party store you’re heading to is a repeat performance for everyone but you, though it didn’t seem like anyone minded. You figure, from the snippets of conversation as your group of four filters into the shop, that this is more of a way of killing time before getting to eat out. 

Every shelf and wall is lined with so much _stuff_. Judging by your friends’ comments, they’ve been stocking only more and more new items as Halloween drew closer. And though they’re off limits for Friday, this year’s selection of bootleg character costumes are incredibly distracting... and tempting. 

Jason and Andrew huddle around a rack of “Colonel America”s and “Beam-Sword Space Warrior”s, while Abby nudges you over to where the more classical, time-honored options are displayed every Autumn– near the back and to the right of the large room, draped off of a collection of chipped wire hangers on the few racks underneath a line of dusty window panes. 

There’s not much to take in. This area specifically seems to have been heavily picked over, which you suspect is closely related to the precise reason why you’re here in this section too. 

Your eyes wander over what’s available, passing over all of the pumpkin outfits and Frankenstein’s monster sets and werewolf masks. It’s not that you’re picky, but you don’t think you’re feeling any of these, and it doesn’t help that your options are narrowed down even further by the updated taken costumes list Abby texted you, either. And carding through the rack with your cold numbed hand, trying to get a more thorough look, produces little result.

You’re about to give up and grab something at random, when something catches your eye oh so luckily. It’s crazy that you find it in the first place, crammed near the back and between some togas. It’s slipping off of a shoulder of its hanger, so you catch sight of the bottom part of it slumping onto the ground.

You like it, which is more than what you were expecting from this last-minute of a trip. You don’t waste any time in immediately seizing it from its neglected spot and bringing it over to the register.

You just think it looks cool.

Abby wanders over to you from the plastic bucket of random, loose accessories she’d been picking over, while the others are gathering what looks to be a giant mass of fake cobwebs. She looks over your choice, a skeleton costume draped over the wooden counter, nodding enthusiastically.

“That’s a killer find,” she commends, palms filled with jangling plastic beads. The guy behind the counter throws your costume into a plastic bag and hands it back to you with your change.

“Thank you, thank you. I hope everyone approves,” you tease back, disingenuously, but you’re quietly having a lot of fun away from your unrelenting stack of midterm prep. Fun in a mundane way, but you feel warm. And hungry.

You wait for Abby to buy her spooky bead necklaces, and then you hold your shopping bag open for her to drop them in. She leaves to round everyone up, leaving you to head over to the vase by the door and fish out your dripping umbrella from a cluster of others. Out of the corner of your eye you see Andrew cramming his two armfuls of purchased spiderwebs into his backpack. You envision yourself shoveling all that off the couch to sleep when you stay in a couple days.

Andrew and Jason don’t ask what you got– but you don’t know if you’re supposed to actually be keeping your costumes secret anyway.

As you’re all trying to pick a place to eat, when Jason backs out in favor of heading back to the student lot to commute home before it got too late. 

The three of you that remain could go out, but in the middle of the school week it just feels weird and oddly extravagant without him. Especially when none of you knew if you’d be flunking out this semester yet. So, Andrew heads back to his place to “study,” and you and Abby just make the walk directly back to her dorm.

It’s not really that much of a bummer, to be honest. Abby’s company is totally fulfilling for you, as you make your circuit back through the pavement and grass. The moon is already out in the darkening grey, though just a vague light behind the blanket of overcast. You talk about your work in the cafe’s kitchen and what makes the new movie she likes good. The perimeters of your umbrellas softly bump into each other every few minutes with how close you stay to each other.

As soon as you get home, after throwing your wet jackets on the hooks glued to the bedroom door, Abby opens a streaming site on her laptop, sets some Nick Drake on shuffle, and rifles through her drawer for something.

You drop down on her bed and commence zoning out, letting one soft acoustic folk song flow into the next soft acoustic folk song, until she eventually pulls out a crisp pair of haircutting scissors.

“C’mon, let’s do this.”

You obediently sit down on the shag rug to avoid getting hair on her bed as she gets settled. “Just don’t cut too much off... or give me a bowl-cut. Please.” 

“Don’t worry. I don’t want my costume to have to compete with your haircut.”

You shoot an amused side eye up at her and she lands softly on her knees and shuffles behind you to work. “Great! That’s all I wanted to hear.” 

“I also want to avoid you never coming to another one of these parties again,” she scoffs, already cutting at the top layer of your hair that’s reaching the middle of your ears.

“Well, that’s what’s at stake.” You’re kinda serious. But, you think it’s a little too late to back out now with her scissors circling your head in hummingbird-like motions. Snipping away. You start zoning out again rather quickly, listening to the music as her methodical cutting technique became another layer of white noise. By this point you fully trust, or have resigned yourself, that Abby knows what she’s doing.

You had expected this to last only a couple of minutes, so when ten pass you pull out your phone and mindlessly scroll, look at pictures you took of class diagrams and event pages.

Eventually, out of the tangle of interwoven noises, she speaks– seeming almost as if she had been in a haze herself. Or very, very focused. “Alright! I think I’m done...” she trails off, making another circle around you, bending downwards at certain intervals to muss your hair into order.

The fact that Abby doesn’t own a buzzer, and you don’t want her to grab her body razor, is fine– you keep the hair at the nape of your neck pretty neat. So, when she puts down the shears, she’s really done. You get up unsteadily, one of your feet numb for the past while, and half limp to her desk mirror– fiddling with the angle so that you can see.

“What do you think?”

“This is...” you start, fixing some of the hair above your eyes. Shorter now. “This is nice. Really.” You take in the new haircut with an alternating smile and lax-mouthed concentration. It looks a lot like the one you had before you let it grow out too much. Everything’s just trimmer, even a little messy where Abby tried to maintain some layers. Your dark bangs are an inch above your eyebrows now, instead of being in the territory where you were constantly blinking them away, and they fall down straight and to the side of your face. The hair by your ears is neat and no longer covering them, though you fiddle with tucking them behind anyway. “Thank you.”

You wonder what Paul would think. Not that it would change anything– you feel self-conscious even having thoughts like that.

“You’re welcome!” Abby lilted, tired but satisfied with your reaction, and began getting up to flop onto her bed, taking up the entire space. You sit back down on the carpet and let her take a minute.

The playlist still rolls on as you drag one of your textbooks from underneath the bed. You figure you’ve put it off long enough and pull out one of your notebooks too to keep alongside you– scrawling and checking as you read. Smearing graphite on margins and flipping through pages with soft crackling paper sounds.

You keep it up for maybe two hours, before your tiredness starts sinking in. You think Abby’s actually asleep, and looking up to confirms the back of her askew head and the stillness body. 

You read some more. Your notes trickle down in overall descriptiveness. The playlist loops. You stifle a yawn into your hand and meet Abby’s curious eyes peering down from the bed. 

“Yeah.” She pipes up softly, vocally affirming a silent question of hers. “You look really good.”

-

Wednesday is more classes, studying, lunch, classes, and studying. It’s still raining by the time you’re finishing up with your last class and heading to Andrew’s dorm with a change of clothes from Abby’s in your bag.

Since you can only stay overnight at her place three times a week, you usually spend a night at Andrew’s so you don’t have to go all the way to your house and back in the middle of the week. It’s pretty convenient, and you’re lucky that you could work out something like this for yourself. 

Though it wasn’t perfect.

You hear the noise even before you walk in. Muffled pulsing music of conflicting volumes and genres, laughing, doors slamming. As soon as you trudge past the entrance of his residence hall, thirty pounds of backpack hanging off an arm, the amount of noise that hits you is actually physically draining to take in. Still, you continue onwards, exhausted enough to find the idea of postponing your journey to Andrew’s couch, for any reason, to be currently too overwhelming to think about. You backhand the call button by the elevator. The security guard at the front desk ignores you.

Unlike Abby’s single, Andrew’s room was apartment style. He lived with three other roommates with each of their private bedrooms, all connected with a common living area and what passed as a kitchen. Their living room couch is your once-a-week bed, as well as that of a couple other friends of theirs who took turns with you throughout the month. 

There was a lot of people coming in and out of there, all of the time; again, you didn’t just prefer staying with Abby because of her company.

You dare to hope as you knock on his door. Then knock again. One of Andrew’s roommates finally opens the door and over his head you see ten other people and a full game of beer pong transpiring. Andrew is on your future bed with a few other people, playing what looks to be some kind of video game tournament.

“Hey! Dan! Come in.” The roommate waves you through with bloodshot eyes and then slinks back out of sight through the open door of his bedroom. 

It was smoky in here. You drop your bag by the door, and any deafening thud is drowned out by the fighting game sound effects and dance music. Andrew shoots you a distracted glance as you automatically head to where he’s situated, slamming his fingers in a secret pattern on his controller. 

“We’re almost done! This is the last match,” he shouts over to you against the noise. It’s too loud for you to bother trying to answer him back. 

Fuck it. You pour yourself a red solo cup from a bottle of whatever while you wait around. 

You set a timer for fifteen minutes, already on an emotionless autopilot forged from many past occurrences like this one. You were hoping a party wouldn’t be the case tonight, but it’s not something you weren’t sort of expecting.

And after the alarm comes and goes, vibrating in your free hand, you leave the cup on a spare inch of cluttered kitchen-top and grab your bag on your way out of the building, towards the main university library.

It’s the only library that’s open this late– twenty-four hours during exam periods– and, instead of the music one, is filled with new, modern furniture and fluorescents and an abundance of seating options. You find a cubicle among a mass of them on the main floor and pull out a binder and _Rebecca_. 

After half a page you pass out completely, your head slumping down heavily onto your crossed arms on the desk in front of you.

-

You wake up at like 6AM to someone snoring in the cubicle besides yours. Your eyes feel swollen and warm, you can feel an indent from the edge of your binder in your forearm, and there is definitely drool on the cover of your book. A quick look around at the array of slumped over bodies in every other desk affirms you weren’t alone in this.

Tumbling out of there, a couple of other yawning and rumpled students trailing behind you, you head back to Abby’s dorm.

You sneak in again and she groggily answers her door, woken up by your text warning of your arrival. She climbs back into bed and turns her face back into her piles of comforter, while you grab some toiletries to take a shower down the hall.

You fall asleep in the shower for five full minutes, standing.

The rest of the day is spent in a haze of fatigue, and when you come back, you and Abby cook dinner together in her floor’s kitchen. You pick leaves off of basil stems while she opens cans of tomatoes. She shoots looks of admiration to your hair more than once.

Then, hours later, you collapse in Abby’s bed with a chunk of her hair splayed over your face, forgotten pasta sauce still stuck in it. Not thinking of anything until you fall asleep.

That’s perfect to you.


End file.
